Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

beachy

I switched my primary email to Fastmail a few months ago. My requirements were simply:

- must work well

- must be a paid service with proper support from a vendor focused on email (i.e. not consumer gmail)

- must allow custom domains (so I can regain control over my email if the provider goes under by updating MX records)

- must be the cheapest in the absence of compelling benefits (ruled out GSuite or protonmail)

Fastmail fitted the bill and seems to be working as I would expect.

View on HN

For me, the primary concern are the horror stories of having everything in your life linked to a gmail account and then getting locked out with no recourse from google support. My secondary concern is to have a custom domain and email aliases. In my country the abuse of personal information is rampant and I would like to start pursuing companies who sells my information without consent.

Now if only I could generate a mobile number (msisdn aliasing?) for each entity I interact with, so that I can know who sells my number to spam callers.

Used FastMail as part of my big DeGoogle initiative last winter. Very happy with it. However, one of the main considerations of Fastmail vs. other providers is that the domains they used are 'Visa-free' in terms of spam catchment - everything gets through!

But some have noted that FM is an Australian service with some interesting issues around privacy and five-eyes surveillance.

For me, in the end, I had to pay that price (as well as the sensible prices of the service itself), because I really needed my business mails to arrive in people's inboxes.

I can understand ruling out GSuite but why did you rule out protonmail?

I believe it was cheaper back then. Doesn't seem to be now :)

I switched from protonmail to fastmail recently. Fastmail was a ton faster and didn't randomly forget my sessions. Night and day to use. It also let me use two custom domains without paying twice, which was nice.

I cancelled protonmail and the subscription ended right away instead of at the end of the paid period, so there’s that. Honestly it was just a bunch of little things that added up. I don’t remember any one thing that was specifically distasteful except for the cancellation. I’m on fastmail now.

I had a bad experience as well. Been a long time proton user. I had a CC incident where the proton mail annual charge was incorrectly, without my confirmation labeled unauthorized.

PM cut off access to my account for 4 days as the issue was being resolved with them. Like, yeah I get it shitty situation and they probably have to deal with a bunch of scammers but I think it was way too extreme of a response given I explained what happened and have been a long term customer.

I'm thinking about going back to Gmail now.... any ideas how to defend against this? For example, have a tested procedure to change MX records of the custom domain to another provider or even self hosted in order to restore email access while an issue is being resolved?

What do you do about Google docs? Or do you pay separately for O365?

I was primarily concerned with losing access to email and getting locked out of all my downstream accounts. Not so much an aversion to all things Google. So I still have gmail and still use Google docs. But for any important signups or comms, I use my Fastmail address.

You can always create a personal Google account with your custom domain email address: still has access to everything except Gmail.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com